folktale
by hewhoistomriddle
Summary: Thresh, district eleven, songs and stories. Written for Starvation.


**Title: folktale  
****Summary: Thresh, District Eleven, songs and stories**.

Written for the Starvation forum prompt: _epic. _

_Disclaimer: _I forget where I got the opening quote. Ending quote is Rumi. Also, shoutouts to the Oscars, and pop culture in general. (_Note: S_omeday, I will learn to write properly.)

* * *

_I'll keep the darkness out. I'll tell you fairytales._

~.~

District One has fifty words for gemstones. District Four has seventy words for water in its various states. District Eleven has more than a hundred for harvest. They were a naturally garrulous people, prone to talking as they labored in the windswept fields or as they ate in the pubs near the granaries, exchanging narratives on a good yield of okra or some new fertilizer developed by Five, and for this, Thresh was an exception.

Thresh had always been a silent boy, even while his parents were still alive. He kept to himself even more as he grew with the years, spent his time tending to crops and burning down tracker jacker nests, rather than tarrying with boys his age, sharing farmhand's duties and chasing grooslings down the narrow dirt roads that spiderwebbed the fields and talking.

While they filled their world with words and semantics and metaphors that meant nothing to him, Thresh would work in the fields for as long as the Peacekeepers would allow, diligently tracing the path of infant chlorophyll until the seasons transmuted them into sprawling fields pregnant with golden grain, edged with happy patches of clover and brambles with juicy red berries. Warm winds would make the grain rustle in their sheaths and send dandelion seeds billowing up the sky as if on a pilgrimage to heaven.

Thresh meets Rue on one such field, after most Peacekeepers have gone home. She was foraging for wild berries if the stains and scratches on her hands were anything to go by, cooing to a small mockingjay; she was barely nine and small as a bird herself. He remembers her voice raised in song, spirited and alive and clear as a bell, from the harvests.

District Eleven had sang with her, in the mornings and all through the day, at dusk, as the night dawned with its crystal moon: sweet ballads and harvest songs, serenades and lullabies. In every song was a secret history, tales upon tales of long ago, somehow escaping Capitol revisionism, of peoples and nations and stretches of golden peace, of epics and odysseys, of kings who made stutter-speeches and girls who danced like swans, of princesses only found by the light of a thousand lanterns, of survivors. Of tree-huggers and free love. Of magical schools and trains leaving behind a billowing trail of scarlet smoke. Of networks in a place beyond where one's birthplace nor blood nor stature didn't weigh as millstones.

Thresh liked those songs, whatever their metaphors. When he heard them a frisson of something warm as summer would break over his skin and he would feel immeasurably content as he had never been for years.

~.~

_I killed buried her in flowers. And I sang her to sleep._

_Your district...they sent me bread._

_Do it fast, okay, Thresh?_

Katniss doesn't say anymore, her silence eloquent enough.

Thresh remembers seeing her picture in the sky, flashing above the darkened pines. In his mind, there had been another tree, one that would belong in a District Eleven orchard, and eight branches up there was Rue. She had the same young face, the same scars from when she fell, the same small bones straining against dark skin, but it was an ephemeral her, her outline fuzzy in effusive sunlight, her gaze fixed on a point far away. Already, she was already losing weight and color and substance, disappearing, and nothing left. The singing little girl was dead.

In any case, he was still there and in front of him was Katniss Everdeen, injured and vulnerable. She honored Rue's death and she avenged it. She sang Rue to sleep and that by itself is more than good enough, more than he – or anyone else – have ever done for Rue. What Katniss did was honorable and unbidden, infinitely risky, with nothing for herself to gain.

From the _seediest _District they said. From the most _barbaric _District they said. From the most _uncivilized_ District they said. Semantics, semantics.

Thresh owes this girl a debt so loud it thrums in his bones. There's only one way he could repay it. There are no words.

~.~

Thresh doesn't go down without a fight. He wonders if they would include it in the folk tales sung on nights of the harvest, where men crawled in tired from the fields and needed only a hummed melody to invite sleep into their bodies: the sky grey as ash, bearing heavily down on him and Cato locked in combat. If they would sing of Rue and the Hunger Games and the girl on fire. Of how he was always best at getting the squash to flower, of how he was whipped exactly three times in his teens for foraging when he'd never done such a thing (as it is with Prim, as it is with Rue, Katniss and him have more in common than she would ever know), of how he'd tried to do the honorable thing, of being wordlessly brave under the spotlight of the Capitol.

Someplace brighter than light shimmers beyond his eyelids. A mockingjay sings a melody that seems perfectly written. Thresh opens his eyes and sees green fields that stretches to farther than he can see. Star-petalled flowers called Rue sway and sigh sweetly to where the wind blows. It is spring again.

~.~

_Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,_

_there is a field. I'll meet you there._


End file.
